


and i perhaps am secret

by rooftoplights



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Canon compliant-ish, F/M, Help, Katara (Avatar)-centric, Romance, also kind of canon-divergent, i fell into this sunken ship and now i can't get out, zutara is still endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23500675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rooftoplights/pseuds/rooftoplights
Summary: This is how she finds him; slowly, and then all at once.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 214





	and i perhaps am secret

**Author's Note:**

> a rather incoherent reimagining of their relationship throughout the series.
> 
> title is from paradise lost by john milton.
> 
> edit: on the sea by beach house is a song that fits really well with katara here if you're interested.

* * *

" _Which is to say: this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue."_

— Ocean Vuong, "Homewrecker"

* * *

This is how she finds him; slowly, and then all at once.

..

In the beginning, he is a puzzle she does not care to solve; a cracked mosaic with too many jagged edges and sharpened points that piecing them all together would make the water she bends run red.

There is a lost boy under there, under that scar and that scowl and that sadness behind the gold in his eyes. That she knows, that she is sure of.

For a long time, the knowledge eludes her; that solemn understanding of not knowing where to go once the moon bleeds into the sky and the sun rises and falls. The realization that perhaps the path she has always taken has not always been the right one.

But that is later. Katara has always been a girl of _now_.

..

She is fourteen and the world is a scary place.

She is young, that is all her Gran Gran has ever told her. She is young and she will grow and she will learn.

And she does.

But the dread — that blossomed when she left her mother and ran towards the edge of the home she believed was hers, that began to eat away at her as the men in black and crimson would come and take and come and take until there was nothing left but a skeleton of a tribe with faces she thinks will one day fade — never leaves her. It is there so often she begins to think it is a part of herself. That all things will end, and everyone will say their goodbyes in due time and disappear into the horizon.

That she will be left alone with herself and her dread and spinning water and watching it float and sink will be the kind of life that she will remember when she is eighty and dying.

After all, that is the way the world is. Scary and fragmented and fraying at the seams. A bit like him.

(A bit like her.)

..

When she discovers that small child encased in the ice floating in the middle of the frozen sea, she wonders if this will be different. If this is her chance to do something good. The rage that despairs within her can only be suppressed by her need to find someone to care for. Someone who might not leave.

It is funny then, and funny later, because she is the one who ends up leaving. There is a segment of her heart that swells when it happens. She should feel worse, but she only feels better, lighter, more herself.

..

She dreams of that cave in Ba Sing Se so often it feels less than real.

There is always this: the green glow of the crystals casting eerie shadows across his face; the sharp lilt of her words as she whittles them down to what she knows will hurt him the most; the vision, the _memory_ , of his back, hunched over and wilted, all the fire dissipating from those pillars that should hold him up, that should vindicate all this anger she carries with her wherever she goes.

And then there are the things that change with each reinvention: she drowns him, she kisses him, she uses the Northern Water Tribe water to heal that scar he will never tell anyone about. She shouts at him until he turns to face her, she cries. She cries and then berates him. She toys him about in her mind, watches him sway as if he were a thief being hanged for stealing her faith, for setting fire to the trust she had thought was her strength.

They end like this: she says something and he nods. She never remembers what she says, only that it is a secret, something she has pried from her soul in the quiet hope that he will understand. He does. In every dream, he does. Even when she can’t see his face, she knows.

And then it is her on the wet, sopping floor, holding a lifeless Aang in her arms and wondering why there is so much in those eyes that she can forgive and so little she cannot. Why that little that she cannot stings so intensely she forgets she has forgiven him for all the rest.

..

Their first kiss is not after the war. It is not after Azula and her chains and Zuko lying formless on the brink of life and death.

It is before.

She will never tell this to anyone.

It is after she comes back from hunting Yon Rha, after Aang pins her in place with those damned words that are meant for comfort and only come off as patronizing and self-righteous.

Is this where the resentment started? Some days, she thinks it was. Others, she reproaches herself for finding too much comfort in lies.

She crawls off Appa and storms away, not caring to catch the upset look that has crossed over Aang’s face, or the heat of that golden gaze on her back. She wonders if he will follow. She wonders if she wants him to.

She finds a secluded spot at the very back of the temple where she knows Aang and the others will never think to go and lets the water overtake her.

She closes her eyes and dances.

The sounds of destruction melt into the melody she sings inside her head. An old Southern Water Tribe song. A song her mother had sang more than once.

She dances and destroys and cries until there is nothing left anymore to expel out.

She can hear them coming and a part of her recoils. She was never this much of a coward until now. She hears Toph’s heavy gait, Suki’s light steps, Sokka’s sword clashing against his hip, Aang lighter than air. She hears Zuko’s voice, rising above all those sounds that threaten to drive her insane, firm and commanding. She hears the crown prince in it, as he tells them to leave her be.

And they do. There is a whine that sounds like Aang’s and a yelp that she knows belongs to Sokka but eventually the clatter fades and she is alone.

She almost collapses from relief.

And then she spots him.

He does not blink at her wild hair and her wild eyes. He does not seem fazed by the anger that continues to course through her veins. He accepts it, as he leans against the wall, a distance kept between them that is enough for her to still feel safe.

“You’re not who you think you are,” he starts.

She scoffs. “And what am I?”

His gaze turns sad. “Brave.”

“Not a monster?” flees from her mouth before she can stop it.

He steals confessions from her without trying. It should frighten her, and it does, but it doesn’t hide the weight that lifts from her shoulders each time she parts with them. Her sins, her darkness.

He shakes his head. “Never,” he says, adamant. “Never in a million years.”

She takes a step forward. “And how would you know?”

He doesn’t move, only meets her eyes with that flood of gold that is unwavering. It grounds her somehow, brings her back down to where she is and what she knows. “I grew up with them. I know what makes a monster.”

Her voice is small when she says, “How did you know you weren’t one?”

He shrugs and she thinks she imagines the way his shoulders tighten. “I don’t.” She takes another step forward. “But if I were, I would know even more clearly that you are anything but a monster.”

“I—,” she doesn’t know what to say. “I _tortured_ him.”

“And you let him go.”

“I would have killed him,” she says. “I really would have,” she is almost pleading now. “I would have, I know I would.”

He just stands there, looking at her without pity. “That doesn’t make you a monster. It makes you human, Katara.”

Her voice trembles at her name. “But—”

“But what?” he asks patiently. “He hurt you, he killed your mother. You have every right to want to hurt him back. You have every right to take back the justice that has been stolen from you.”

Justice. It echoes in her head. Justice. _He understands_ , of course he does.

She leans up just to observe the way his eyes darken. She watches him watch her and knows that all the dark and ugly parts of her are out in the open now, waiting to be seen.

When she kisses him, he responds in kind, as if he has been waiting for this. As if all it took was the realization of their mutual understanding. This understanding she does not know what to label aside from a _thank you_. _A thank you for knowing who I am and what I will be_.

It makes her dizzy and desperate and she holds onto him for dear life even as she feels a fire begin to kindle inside her. She wonders if he can feel it too.

When he curls a hand into her hair and tightens his grip around her waist, she gets her answer.

..

She sits on the sand of the beach and stares into the dark sea, wondering if it will pull her into the warm embrace of the water and push the secrets of the universe into her bones. She can feel the ghost of Aang’s sudden kiss on her lips, along with the guilt that cradles itself in the back of her throat.

She wishes she could find the girl he wants inside herself, wishes that there would be no more lies then. Wishes she would no longer have to hide behind the war, and the play, and the memory of a boy with a scar who tries too hard and cares too much.

She lifts her hand up and starts at how much thinner her wrist looks. She’s been eating better, eating more now that Zuko cooks most days with the kind of easy talent she envies. She wants that easiness, craves it. She wants for just one thing to go her way without the sweat and tears that she has tirelessly given up for only the spirits to see.

It’s unfair. It’s so unfair.

It’s unfair that Aang keeps kissing her when she doesn’t know what to do with it afterwards, unfair that this war keeps tearing apart her family until she’s not sure she remembers how long she has with her father before he is taken away. It’s unfair that everyone can spill their secrets into this cavernous hole that grows inside her like a plant that flails in rainwater, but there is no one she can throw her own hurts into, no one to catch her when she falls without thinking she will catch them first.

She doesn’t hear him until he is standing beside her, hair billowing in the wind.

She looks at him as he looks at the sea and she waits. She thinks dimly that they are both good at that, at waiting.

“When I was younger,” he begins softly, “Azula would always ask me to play pai sho with her. She said she wanted practice, because she wanted to be great, to be the best.” A minute of silence. “I was the one who taught her.”

His gaze remains fixed on the infinitesimal break in color between the waves and the sky. “She won over me easily by the end, as she did in all things.” A trace of bitterness. “I was always her first stepping block, the first person she could beat. Proof that she was born lucky.”

She doesn’t ask him why he is telling her this. Instead, she only says, “I’m sure there was something you were better at.”

A sad twist of his lips. She wants to smooth them out with her own. “I was better at being easier to read. And fighting,” he adds hesitantly. “Sword fighting. Azula never cared for any fighting beyond firebending. She didn’t need to. She had that and it was enough.”

“Why wasn’t it enough for you?”

He still does not look at her, nor does he make any move to sit down. “I think there is very little that will ever be enough for me.”

Quietly, she agrees, and there is a small part of her that wonders, _would I_? _Would I be enough for you?_ But she casts that into the ocean and hopes it sinks to the bottom.

They are so impossibly young, so impossibly foolish and young.

“Could you teach me?” she asks abruptly. She does not know why she says this.

He glances at her in surprise, broken out of his melancholy stupor. “When?”

She inclines her head and thinks she loves him for not asking why. “Now,” she says simply.

He grazes the back of his neck with a pale hand. There is something beautiful in how he looks in the moonlight. “I don’t have my swords.”

She meets his gaze and feels the most steady she has in months. “Teach me one day.”

He swallows. “All right.” And there is a hidden promise in that.

..

She never recovers from that moment — that culmination of all the dread and fear and anguish she hides as though it were her second nature — etched into her mind.

Years will pass and she will still shudder and sob and shake when a flash of lightning bolts against the sky. There will be a dozen images that are contained, that burst forth in that white light; Azula with her crazed, frenzied, hands, Zuko crumpling to the ground, and her, standing still, with a nightmare she would never have believed playing out like an Ember Island play in front of her.

Aang will try and soothe her in that awkward, cheerful way that he always falls back on, and flinch when her breakdowns only become more severe. She will gaze at the stormy sky and try to conjure up his face. If she succeeds, her cries will eventually recede and she will hear the relieved sigh that the boy, still a child at heart, lets out.

If she doesn’t, she will feel herself dissolve into the clouds, into the whirlwind that she has created. And there is nothing Aang can do but fly away, fear in all the ways he looks at her as he fades from her blurred vision.

..

When she heals him, he tells her how he got his scar.

This is how she finds him, this is how she gathers the shattered limbs of this boy, _this man_ , that she loves and sews them back together again. This is how she remembers.

She is crying as she draws the water and concentrates it on his heart. And even half-conscious and in enormous pain, he wills her not to cry with a weak smile and a brush of his fingertips against her cheeks.

“I’ll be okay, Katara,” he murmurs. “You’re healing me.” His eyes fall shut.

The weeping continues, and in her dazed and addled mind she tries to find a better way, a way that is more deserving of a crown prince, a fire lord.

A way that is more deserving of _him_ , who met death without a second thought in order for her to be safe. Who made her feel at home wherever she was, who _understood_ without having to ask.

She does not know how she can ever repay him. She does not know how to stop loving him. Perhaps that is why she dives back into her work with more fervor, with a kind of desperation she has not known since she was a child, trying to shake her mother back to life.

When his eyes open again, it is night, and her healing is finding more of a home in his body. She has done everything she could. She hopes Yue knows from far above, hopes there is at least one witness to this sad truth she cannot share.

“How long have I been out?” he asks quietly. His breathing has finally returned to a steady beat. Her shoulders sag in relief.

“Half a day,” she says. “I think it will be morning soon.”

“Well,” he quirks a small smile at her that almost makes her cry again, “I rise with the sun, don’t I?”

She laughs without meaning to and there is something light fluttering in her chest. “How do you feel?”

He shrugs and tries to sit up, though she hurries to help him before he can do it on his own. “I’m okay, Katara, really.” She ignores him.

“You were hit by lightning,” she says, still not quite believing it, “in the _heart_.” _For me,_ she doesn’t add.

He doesn’t respond, gaze captured by the moon. “I can see why your people love the moon so much,” he says instead. “It’s beautiful.”

She doesn’t look away from his face. “Yes,” she says absently. Her eyes catch on his scar. She wonders if she can heal it now, without the special water, with just the power she springs from the moon.

“How did you get it?” she hears herself say.

He turns back to her. “The scar?” he asks.

She nods, some part of her afraid that he will not tell her.

But he does. As he always has.

“My father,” he begins, voice distant, detached, as if this were a memory he has gone over too many times in his head that the novelty of it has worn off. “I had disrespected him.”

She inhales sharply, and thinks of Ozai, of his rage, of the monster that he has made of himself and his daughter. “What did you do?” she asks, dread coiling in the pit of her stomach.

He sighs.

She winces. “You don’t have to tell me at all,” she says rushed.

His hand finds hers above the sheets and silk, warm and reassuring. “No, I will. You want to know and you’ve done so much for me already.”

“I was thirteen.” He pauses. “Azula was already a prodigy; she had her lightning and her fire and she left me in the dust, but she was still younger than me. She was still a child, while I was on my way to becoming a man, a proper prince.”

When he speaks again, he sounds as if he is in a dream. “I heard there was a war council and so I tried my best to find my way in, I knew that if there was any chance of proving to my father I was worthy, it would be in there, where not even Azula could impress her way in. The doors were locked, but I begged my uncle and he relented, though not before warning me to say nothing.”

“And I was going to,” he says defensively, “and then… and then a general proposed offering up the new recruits to get slaughtered as a way to distract the opponent. And I couldn’t believe it, I just — to toss away their lives like that — it was wrong.” He looks away, apprehensive she won’t understand.

She wants to show him that she does, wants to show him he was _right_ , so she smiles gently even as the anger at her father develops within her.

He goes on. “So I spoke out of a turn and my father was outraged. He challenged me to an Agni Kai, and I accepted. I thought I would be fighting the general, not him. But he told me that I had disrespected him because it had been _his_ meeting. But I couldn’t fight him,” his voice wavered, “he was my father. You—can’t fight your father, not to the death. I refused, and by doing so, lost my place. And I gained this scar.”

He doesn’t flinch when she brushes her hand against it for the second time. “It’s you,” she says simply. And there is more than the memory of the catacombs in her words.

He doesn’t ask what she means. He doesn’t have to.

..

She leaves after his coronation, feet falling in step after Aaang, to go on and explore the world.

She tries not to think of the disappointment that had glimmered in that sea of gold. She tries not to think of it when Aang kisses her and some part of her heart withers into a warped, bleeding, misshapen wreck that misses the wrong person. She wills her lips to move but they don’t, as if they know and they don’t approve. As if this is their own rebellion against the destiny she has convinced herself is written in the stars.

There is something wrong with her.

That is the only other thought that pervades each day she spends for the two years that Aang claims her for himself.

In vain, she waits for him to notice, but he doesn’t. There are only wide grey eyes on a sickeningly happy face. She can see her reflection in this child’s eyes, and wonders when she started being a phantom for someone she used to love.

Somewhere, in some other time, she knows this is her penance. Knows that as she is suffering, _he_ was too.

For a late bloomer, he figured it out long before she did.

..

“Where will you go?” he asks. The turtleducks around him make soft noises as their downy fur is swept away in the water of the pond. His hair is out of his face, gathered in the top knot that plays fiddle to the gleaming gold crown. It’s almost enough to outshine the color of his eyes. _Almost_.

Is this another dream?

There she is, sitting beside him with bread crumbs falling from her fingertips as she stares at the ground. “Aang wants me to go with him to the Air Temples,” she says. “To see if there are any other airbenders left.”

He nods absently. “What do _you_ want to do?”

She flails for a moment. “I don’t know,” she replies honestly, “I… I want time to figure it all out. Figure the world out, now that this—” she gestures at his palace, “is all over.”

He stays quiet, as if he knows she has more to say. She does. “I need to learn how to live again.”

“How have you lived up until now?”

She thinks about it. “I don’t think I’ve really found myself,” she says, hesitantly. “I found Aang, and Toph and Suki and… and you,” her voice softens, “but I don’t know who I am. I don’t know if I’ll ever know.”

“Do you know,” she begins, “I have never felt more alive than when I was chasing Yon Rha down, when I had control for once, to do what I wanted. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. But it felt right, in a sort of way.”

If she told this to anyone else, she would be afraid they would think her a monster. But this is him.

She tries not to think of that kiss.

“You should do what you want,” he says without looking at her, “not what anyone else thinks you want.”

But they both know she won’t. There are too many stories she would have to unravel, too many untruths she would have to show to all the rest without the same understanding she has with him.

_Brave_ , he said back at the Western Air Temple. _Brave_ , she scoffs now to think about it.

..

There is an assassination attempt on his life a year in, from Mai’s father of all people. Aang wants to visit him, but she refuses. She cannot.

He will know, or perhaps he has known all along. She’s found too much comfort in these lies she’s built up. Lies are all she and Aang are.

She asks Aang to fly them to the South Pole instead and warms herself with furs instead of the memory of his body heat. She will keep running, she thinks. Always running.

Somewhere along the line, she’d become like Aang, afraid to face what she knows deep inside to be the truth.

This is how she loses him.

This is how he slips from her fingers like water, because she no longer has the strength to keep them closed.

..

It is only when she comes across a young boy in the Earth Kingdom one day, that she wonders if she should stop. If this is what it means to have had enough.

His name is Lee. He offers it up without explanation.

He is practicing with two small swords, and while they seem poorly made, he moves with a swiftness she does not anticipate. The dance looks oddly familiar, until she realizes she has seen Zuko perform the same movements some long years ago.

“How did you learn?” she asks. Aang is up ahead, entertaining a crowd of giggling spectators with his airbending tricks. He doesn’t seem to notice she’s lagged behind.

He glances at her in surprise and his arms come to hang awkwardly at his sides. She wonders if he will ask her if she is the Avatar’s waterbender, the only question she has been posed since the war ended.

He doesn’t ask her. Instead, he exhales as a stream of sweat trails its way down his temple, and says, “A firebender. A firebender taught me.”

“Oh,” and there is a part of her heart that clenches at the thought of who it was. “Do you know any more moves?”

“No,” the boy says sadly, “I—We made him leave. I never learned past this. Now I just practice and practice and hope I’m improving.”

“Do...” she pauses and wonders if she should restrain herself, “do you ever miss him?”

His brows furrow in confusion. He is a stranger, she reminds herself, and she is about to pretend the whole thing never happened and catch up with Aang when he says, “Yes. I think a lot about what might have happened if I had asked him to stay.” He shrugs, but it doesn’t undercut the sincerity in his words. “I think I would have been much better than I am now.”

If he notices the tears that shine in the corner of her eyes, he does not say a word.

..

From then on, the color red intensifies the guilt even deeper inside of her. She sees it everywhere. Sometimes in her own reflection, blurry and indistinct in the stream water.

..

And then it breaks.

It happens like this: in a dream.

She is falling. Properly falling. The world seems to stop as she slips from Appa’s back and plummets to the city below. Nothing can stop her, nothing _will_ stop her. So she is falling, and falling, and she closes her eyes and tries to feel the air.

There is nothing. The air evades her, pushes her down, careens her back and forth in the wind. She wonders when she thought it might hold her up, wonders when she started accepting that it wouldn’t.

Appa swerves to intercept her, Aang’s eyes round with fear. She thinks it is because she almost died, but then she looks down. She is on fire, flames erupting from thin air and licking at her ankles, her calves, her thighs. They surround her. She loses sight of Aang, of Appa, of the safety of lies, and the half-truths that the stars tell.

Aang is yelling something in the wind, but she doesn’t hear him. All she can hear is the rush of her heart in her ears, the movement of the sea as it returns to her.

She is falling, but this time she can breathe. This time, the fire grazes her elbows and her chin but she feels no pain. This time, the sea is within her and without, and she dances.

And she sees herself: a girl dancing in the sky, on fire, with water at her fingertips that she uses to drown the air.

She is free.

..

She tells Aang it’s over a fortnight before they are due to land at the Royal Palace for Zuko’s twentieth name day banquet. She doesn’t bother to waste time in trying to reason with him why, only says in her kindest voice that there is no one else, that what she’s needed all this time has been to be alone.

This is the last lie she will ever tell.

..

She finds her own ship to the Fire Nation City, and thinks she might be happy. On the way, she writes a letter to her father, telling him she’s coming home.

..

She meets him officially at the gates, but he is only polite and distant, greeting her as though she were a relative he doesn’t remember having.

He looks different. Aged, wiser. The sadness has settled in his eyes, in the lines of his mouth, in the way he bears his burden with more grace than most.

She wonders if there is something of her in that burden, if someone who was an _almost, a nearly there,_ weighs heavier on his shoulders than the daily politics of squabbling aristocrats and tax reforms.

She meets him truly behind the gates, where he hides himself from his country and his long-lost friends.

Even after he registers that she’s there, he continues to gaze calmly at the turtleducks, letting the quiet draw her words out like he did with all her secrets.

“I—” the words catch in her throat and she looks down at her hands, the fingers trembling as she tightens and unfurls them. The sun is blinding and the garden is too large and grand and green for her taste.

She doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to mend this gap that makes her understand how much she has missed him.

He stands at the center of it all and still says nothing. She doesn’t know how to meet his eyes.

“I want to learn to use a sword,” she says finally, finding bravery in his silence. His expression doesn’t change. Even with the years between them, he won’t judge her. For that, she will never not be grateful.

His voice is steady as he replies simply, “You already know.”

“I don’t though,” she counters. “I don’t know _you_.” When she raises her head, all that surrounds her is gold. She could paint the world in that color. She’s not sure she hasn’t already.

His lips curve into the faintest of smiles. Her heart skips a beat. “Yes, you do.”

_Forgive me_ is on the tip of her tongue. She almost says it, but then he stops her with his next words, “But I have found — have spent my whole life finding — that there is always more to learn.”

..

This is how she finds him and this is how she loses him. This is how she loses him and this is how she finds him again.

This is when she learns that the only way she will ever feel alive will be when she is burning from the inside out, melting in on herself and taking him with her, feeling the two wicks of their shadows burst into one.

..

She comes undone beneath the heat of his body slanted against hers, the press of his mouth on the scars that she had forgotten she had, the scars buried so deep only a fire can scorch them out. It’s a fire that lights the fear and the dread that has simmered in the hollows of her lungs, of her heart, of her throat, and brings them to the surface so he knows where he can heal her, where he can right the wrongs of all that the ice had previously frozen.

She finds him, but he finds her first.


End file.
